Death & Overdose Rate of Heroin

I don't think it's healthy for any community to sweep problems like this under the rug because it just ends up keeping people ignorant and less equipped to solve the problem or prevent it from happening. I think heroin is easy to overdose on because it is injected and also the fact that it's a lot more addictive than your average recreational substance plays a big part in that too.

I am a heroin addict and a lot of people I know who use too have ODed. That is because most of them take benzos or are drunk when they shoot up which is very risky. When you shoot heroin it already lowers your heart rate and breathing, but if you are drunk or on benzos too then it lowers it even more. The thing is that in most cases they will rule it as a heroin overdose even if there were other downers in their system.

Click to expand...

True, I have never done heroin, but I have heard of many people close to my friends that have passed by for mixing heroin and alcohol.

This contributes to get them overdosing inadvertently and if they don't end up at the hospital emergency room, the end up dead, sadly.

9.72 per 1000 heroin-user patients per year is the current mortality rate. Figures for heroin abstinence vary from study to study, but levels do increase with age, they are usually quoted as 18-24% over any 5 year period.

About 6-18 deaths for every 100,000 users a year. About 5% of people who report an addiction to heroin are suspected to die from the drug a year. Risk of death is 14 times higher for heroin users compared to non-heroin users.

There are drugs which can be prescribed by a doctor to assist a patient in quiting the use of heroin. A common one is methadone.

I think what you want to know is that about 1% of users die each year.

The main risk of death is overdose, brought on by increasing insensitivity to the drug, and therefore needing bigger and bigger doses to get the same effect.

Another cause is poor quality - inevitable when getting it on the black market. I spotted two reports of stuff which crystallises in the blood stream, and another which was cut with Anthrax.

Heroin users can attempt cold turkey, but that really needs medical supervision. (John Lennon once had a hit single describing the process in a song). This is the best method by far, since it gets it all out of your system, and offers a chance to start afresh.

Often. users are put on methodone, a substitute which is slightly less harmful, but which satisfies the addiction.

At the same time, poisoning deaths related to painkiller abuse have leveled off, even dropping slightly in recent years, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Prescription drug addicts are turning to heroin due to successful efforts to curb narcotic painkiller abuse, said Kelly Dunn, an assistant professor in the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

It's now harder to obtain prescription narcotics, thanks to improved tracking and regulation of the drugs, Dunn said. In addition, manufacturers have changed the formulation of painkillers like OxyContin to make them more difficult to abuse.

"Heroin's cheaper and easily available, and we're seeing increases in places that traditionally haven't had much heroin use," Dunn said. "Once people are dependent on prescription drugs, it's very rare for them to stop on their own with no treatment. If the drugs are suddenly less abusable, they will switch to something else that will alleviate withdrawal."

The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics reports that between 2000 and 2013, the age-adjusted rate for overdose deaths involving heroin nearly quadrupled, rising from 0.7 deaths per 100,000 Americans in 2000 to 2.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2013.

One of the most recent high-profile deaths was that of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in February 2014 from a heroin overdose at age 46...

In New Zealand more than 400 people have died from heroin overdose and one person dies every week on average from this drug and is quite serious and has claimed many lives. I think people need to see what this can do to them and how it can affect the ones they care about, which is shocking to see this occur in the country and in other countries. In the news we see it all the time as it is more known now, as more facts are known now more than before as it has become more of an issue now.